Keeping the Data Promise
A look inside the agency at the state of data and how we can do better. Part two in a three-part series.
A look inside the agency at the state of data and how we can do better. Part two in a three-part series.
In my last column, I castigated the agencies’ dependency on the Microsoft Office toolset and highlighted the process inefficiencies that agencies have been saddled by as a result. In essence, the tools available to agencies don’t sufficiently manage the dynamic nature of managing a client’s media investment. As account teams grow and digital spend continues to increase, this pain point becomes excruciating for the agency. A clear byproduct of this manual state is the loss of a critical agency asset – the data and insights derived from acting over many cycles as the steward of their client’s media spend.
Neither Excel, nor ad servers, nor finance systems allow agencies to benefit from the market knowledge gained through interacting over countless contact points with the sales side of this industry. When the critical, granular detail of an agency’s buying history is contained in countless Excel documents on planners’ desks, or perhaps in an aggregated fashion in a finance system, the agency fails to benefit from leveraging the invaluable insight gained over many cycles of interacting, negotiating, and buying from sellers in the media market.
As anyone inside the agency will tell you, data exists in a disorganized fashion, leading to a critical loss in business performance and effectiveness. Things are never quite as they should be, when it comes to data at the agency.
Yet, no one wishes to remain complacent. After all, this state of affairs inside the agency is very much at odds with the explicit promise of our industry. From the beginning, we have been touting the promise of data and the ability of digital to drive better business results through data analytics.
Digital media’s promise is accountability, yet having to manually capture, massage, aggregate, cleanse, then leverage data across multiple systems and technologies, in order to deliver results and thus fulfill digital’s greater accountability – is sadly drowning the agency in manual process. The data disconnect from multiple point solutions, not integrated at a data-mapping or taxonomy level, is killing the agency’s ability to deliver insights and leverage this supposed data asset. We must bridge this gap. So, what solution can best assist the agency world as it strives to deliver on the promise of data?
What Is the Agency’s Data Problem?
To start, data typically is stored in a disorganized, disaggregated, and decentralized fashion. This leads to sub-optimal insights, time and time again. Not only is data often decentralized, it usually is not uniformly labeled, often the result of individuals labeling or categorizing data in a fashion that makes good sense to them.
In these instances, agencies lose much of their ability to leverage their data in a rolled-up fashion. In this cobbled state, most agencies don’t have the capacity to readily access and leverage their investment data, nor leverage performance data across markets, let alone campaigns. This disarray is the first big problem.
Other issues include the poor, non-line-item input of data into the finance system – rendering that essential system at the heart of the media agency an inadequate source of investment data. It’s almost impossible to derive complete, actionable analysis for clients in the current state of finance and data systems at agencies. Yet, financials are so integral to the work agencies do.
In our ongoing research at my company, through which we’ve heard from over 500 agency insider respondents and conducted over 40 agency systems audits, we have seen very clear, self-reported trends by the agencies themselves. They know the issues (and that’s a start).
In most cases, data is decentralized, living in disparate Excel documents or disconnected ad serving or finance systems. From our research, some examples of this are:
What if We Could Fix This?
Agencies need to be able to access and easily leverage their data asset to benefit their clients. This value they could provide to their clients in a more automated, centralized state comes in the form of:
But, as our findings show, most agencies don’t have the capacity to readily access and leverage their key data assets or investment and performance data, in this way. So, the insights they deliver, to guide decisions, understand the consumer, benchmark, and even optimize, are constrained by the limitations of data analysis. Instead, they factor in a great deal of anecdotal insights, off-the-cuff hypothesis, or learning from other past client work.
Resolving these disparities and disconnects will allow agencies to ground their decisions in real-time, cross-platform data as well as derive more informed insights and benchmarking scenarios. And, their optimization aptitude becomes that much stronger. There is still a place for anecdotal insights, hypotheses, leveraging of past client case history – but strong, real-time data must be at the core of the operation and our systems supporting it must thrive.
What Are the Business Stakes?
Looking at these issues and examples, we can imagine the day-to-day friction, but there are greater stakes at play. Failure to address the state of data systems affects the agencies’ business performance at multiple levels, such as:
Those agencies that address these issues can expect to considerably enhance their overall business performance and gain competitive advantage.
So, What Is the Solution?
Really, there is only one solution: technology. Technology that has the capacity to do three things:
Like so many aspects of imperfect agency life, business can continue status quo – despite known impediments. Agency teams are accustomed to dealing with it. But, we’re at a turning point. Given the increased level of automation within the media business as a whole – and the need to collaborate mechanically on so many levels with other parties – the agency’s core technology must strengthen for it to compete. It’s the agency that has a strong, integrated system and a commitment to the underpinning supportive technology that will be freed up from all this toil. Freed up to be more strategic, more innovative, and more nimble at every turn.